MidWinter Lectures

February 3-5, 2014

Reunion Events for the Classes of

1954, 1964, 1974, 1984, 1994, and 2004-2013

Currie Lecturer

Sam Wells

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells is Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London. He served as dean of Duke University Chapel and research professor of Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School, Durham, N.C., from 2005 to 2012. He has written numerous books and articles on Christian social ethics. Wells was ordained in the Church of England in 1991.

"Being with God" Lecture Series

Currie Lecture 1: "God being with God"Currie Lecture 2: "God being with us"Currie Lecture 3: "Our being with one another"

God’s whole life is shaped to be with us in Christ. Being with is indeed the very nature of God. As we understand the dimensions of what being with entails, we come to understand what is taking place in Christ’s birth, ministry, and passion. This then informs what we think we are trying to do when we engage in mission. God seeks not primarily to work for us but to be with us; our mission should reflect this fundamental character and purpose of God.

Westervelt Lecturer

Scot McKnight

Dr. Scot McKnight is professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary. A recognized authority on the historical Jesus, early Christianity, and the New Testament, his blog, Jesus Creed, explores "the significance of Jesus and the Orthodox Faith for the 21st century." He is the author of more than a dozen books including The King Jesus Gospel (Zondervan, 2011). His current projects are commentaries on the Sermon on the Mount, Colossians, and a book on Paul's spirituality and Jesus' vision for the kingdom.

Lecture 1: The Mission of Paul: Expanding the People of God

Paul's mission has been understood often as getting Romans and Greeks saved from idolatry so they can inherit eternal life, but this approach to Paul fails to understand the apostle Paul's fundamental mission: to expand the people of God to include Israel and thus, not just to get Gentiles right before God but to bring them to the table with Jewish believers so as to create God's grand social experiment, to form a new people of God not marked by prejudices of any kind: social status, ethnic status, gender or sexual status.

Lecture 2: The Christian Life according to Paul: A Life Designed in Community

If Paul's mission was to participate in God's grand social experiment to create a new kind of community, the Christian life in Paul's writings needs to be seen as a life in community. Paul's discussion of the Holy Spirit, of spiritual gifts, of eucharist, and other topics are all shaped to help individual Christians to live in community with those who are unlike them.

Jones Lecturer

Rachel Held Evans

Rachel Held Evans is a New York Times best selling author of Evolving in Monkey Town (Zondervan, 2010) and A Year in Biblical Womanhood (Thomas Nelson Oct, 2012) and a popular Christian blogger. She has been featured on NPR, Slate, The BBC, The Washington Post, The Guardian (UK), The Times London, The Huffington Post, and Oprah.com, and was recently named one of Christianity Today's "50 Women to Watch. "

Lecture 1: “My Year of Biblical Womanhood”

Intrigued by debates within her evangelical community surrounding "biblical womanhood," Held Evans decided to commit one year of her life to following all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible. In this session, Held Evans will share photos and funny stories from the experiment and then discuss how communities of faith can better engage the Bible as a conversation-starter.

Lecture 2: “The Voice in the Wilderness”

In our highly-connected, information-based culture, times of obscurity, exile, and quiet can feel like banishment and yet those are the times when God’s voice is often the clearest. This lecture explores ways in which people of faith can become better listeners in a loud world and celebrates the value of heeding the voices that emerge from the wilderness, from the margins.

Preacher

Shannon Johnson Kershner

Shannon Johnson Kershner is the pastor of Black Mountain Presbyterian Church, Black Mountain, North Carolina. She previously served for seven years as pastor of the Woodhaven Presbyterian Church in Irving, Texas.Kershner received her Bachelor of Arts cum laude from Trinity University and her Master of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary. She also serves as co-director for the strategy team of the NEXT Church movement in the PC(USA).

Hotel Information

Ramada Inn Austin Central

919 East Koenig Lane

Phone Number: 512-472-6232

Room Rate: $68.99 total

Call to reserve, use Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary to get the quoted rate (20 rooms available)